Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 22, 2007

Google Personalized Home Shows Feed Snippets

Google Personalized Homepage tests a new way to display feeds. Instead of only showing the titles, Google displays a snippet from each item and the date. I think the layout looks too complicated and could be simplified by including the snippet in a tooltip, like Live.com does.

Update: It seems that Google shows the full content of a post (at least for this feed and other FeedBurner feeds like Slasdot's), but it does a poor job at handling big images and long text. For most of the other feeds, they only show a snippet. Also, you won't see snippets for ATOM feeds (e.g.: Official Google Blog or any other Blogger blog that uses the default feed).

I see it in my homepage, as well. I'm not too sure I like this design, either. You said to make it a tool-tip like Live.com does. I'm not really a big fan of Live, so I can't say I'm too sure I know what you mean, but I think they should make it like the pop-up you get when you click on a feed item in the Google Reader module for the Personalized homepage. Is that the same thing?

I have waited for this for awhile now, SO glad its here!Now i can quickly open snippets if i only want to have a little quick read and see if i want to open the page up.

Its simple enough as well, no horrible coding or anything, awesome!

The thing about using a pop-up like in Live is that it might require some hacks to get it to work in most browsers.Google try to make everyone happen by using code that pretty much every browser will be able to interpret nicely.Then again, i'm not entirely sure how the live.com preview-popups are coded, so i can't say much on it haha.

Hmmmmm....I think something else might be in order....something more subtle and less intrusive, like, if you mouse over the link, a baseball bat reaches out and smacks you in the head! LOL! Just kidding, the idea is great, but the HUGE cross is kind of distracting....but then,that's why I use Cooliris for Firefox,it pops up the entire page without having to navigate away from my homepage. Plus everything in the pop up (links,forms,etc), works!

As others have said, it's ugly. It seems to be so intrusive and space taking, right now over half my page is covered with the giant blue crosses which are unnecessarily large, and well blue...It's a nice feature, but if they can lighten the cross and maybe make it a bit smaller but the hit area the same size it would be nice. It would also be nice to be able to turn it off......

(maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but it is so repetitive and so intrusive... )

I agree that there ought to be a way to turn it off. I don't mind being forcibly encouraged to try new things in Beta, but Google, the benevolent giver, needs to know when to cut the gift strings. My homepage is a significant part of my online life, and changes like this are stressful, not to mention a little bit creepy: isn't it my personalized home page?

A couple months ago I discovered Google personalized home pages. then just the other day I was checking back into its setup as part of a revamp of what I wanted to see. I found out I could set up to view the feeds of a few blogs I visit daily. I even learned how to set up such a feed from my own blog and get it to Google.

The one issue I'm having is that the plus signs next to each item for expansion either don't show up at all or only show up for some sections on my home page. I have to hit refresh to get all the plus signs to appear in all sections where they should.

Is there a reason why this is occurring? Is there anything I can change which will allow things to appear correctly upon initial Google page load?

Thank you. If it matters, I run Windows ME and IE6. Both are as up to date as they can be or that I care to make them.

This isn't a major issue, but it's somewhat annoying to have to load the page a second time to get the complete functionality.

Alrighty, it's later and I just had my Google home page open properly, plus signs and all on two separate tries in different browser windows. So maybe it was a glitch that has been fixed. Or maybe there was something messed up on my system that has somehow righted itself. Or maybe the issue is still lurking and may yet recur. I'm hoping it's the first or second, not the third scenario.